Cyfarthfa Ironworks

Description of activities

‘In 1765 [Anthony Bacon] leased lands and mining rights at Cyfarthfa, Glamorgan, where he and a cousin by marriage, Dr William Brownrigg, of Whitehaven, Cumberland, built a coke-using ironworks. The next year Bacon purchased a share in the nearby Plymouth works from Isaac Wilkinson and John Guest, its founders, and in 1780 he purchased the balance of Plymouth plus the nearby Hirwaun works. At that point Bacon owned three of the four significant coke iron furnaces in the Merthyr Tudful area. His interest in these works was heightened by the American war and by his association with John Wilkinson, who in 1773 had developed a new technique for manufacturing cannon by boring. Bacon persuaded the Board of Ordnance of the superiority of the new method and obtained large orders for such cannon. These were at first manufactured by Wilkinson at Brosely, Shropshire, but, after Wilkinson’s patent was declared void by the attorney-general, Bacon abandoned his support for Wilkinson and started to make the cannon on his own in Wales….The Cyfarthfa works, which about 1807 were the largest ironworks in the world, were operated for over a century by the Crawshay family until absorbed into Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds in 1902.’

Associated with slave trading: No

Sources: Price, Jacob M. "Bacon, Anthony (bap. 1717, d. 1786), merchant and ironmaster." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 3 Apr. 2018. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-50608.